1798 Rebellion in North Down and the Ards:

The Scottish Connection

Introduction

If you visit the Ards area of County Down today you may well notice a sign in the
UlsterScots language proclaiming ‘Fair faa ye tae the Airds’: ‘Welcome to
theArds’. The Scots

arrived in large numbers to settle in this district during the Plantations era of the
early

seventeenth century and many villages along the Ards Peninsula have in recent
years

restored their historic Scots place names, such as Talbotstoun for Ballyhalbert
and Hard

Breid Raa for North Street in Greyabbey, or Greba. The Scottish connection has
long

been cherished by the people of this area; many regard Scotland as their
ancestral

homeland and its people are certainly their near neighbours. From the eastern
edge of

the Peninsula, which borders the Irish Sea, the Scottish hills and coastline are
often

clearly visible; indeed with a good pair of binoculars it’s sometimes even possible
to

watch Scots farmers operating their tractors in the fields.

In earlier times, a key shipping route between Ulster and Britain was the North
Channel:

the narrow strip of sea between Donaghadee and Portpatrick in southern

Scotland. For

centuries migrant workers crossed the Channel in both directions in search of

employment, whether as seasonal labourers at harvest times or as weavers in

the

developing textile industries.

1600s Ulster - People, Ministers and Covenant

But the links are deeper even than those forged from linguistic similarity or
practical
1
necessity. The early seventeenth century Scots settlers established their
Presbyterian

religion, with its democratic form of church government, throughout the North of
Ireland.

A few generations later their ranks were swollen by Covenanters, members of a

fiercely

independent sect within Presbyterianism who had suffered severe persecution in

Scotland during the reigns of Charles I and Charles II. Essentially the
Covenanters in

Scotland and in Ulster were radicals in their religion and in their politics.

In the Scottish National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant
of

1643 they swore to uphold the principles of the reformation and to oppose the

interference of the King in church government.

According to historian Ian McBride, the Covenant of 1643 ‘was designed to

protect the

gains made by the Calvinist reformation in Scotland and to export the

Presbyterian

model of church government to England and Ireland’. It constituted ‘a radical

programme for the re-ordering of society on a Calvinist basis’. Within this model
the

‘civil magistrate’s authority was limited to secular affairs and the king was a
member of

the church like any other person’.1 The Solemn League and Covenant was
brought to

Ulster in April 1644, overseen by the first Presbyterian minister of Ballywalter,

Rev

James Hamilton. Over the following three months it was signed by thousands of
people at 26 locations across Ulster - in the Ards and north Down it was signed at
Holywood,

Bangor, Newtownards, Comber, Killyleagh and Ballywalter.

Once they had arrived Presbyterians were quickly active in the field of education,

believing that every person, regardless of social status or gender had the right to
read
2
and understand the Scriptures for themselves. Of course, many of these readers
were

not content only with the Scriptures. In the eighteenth century they established
Book

Clubs, early lending libraries, and read works of history, philosophy and poetry.
Scottish

texts were always popular, including Allan Ramsay’s Scots language drama The
Gentle

Shepherd and Wallace, by the poet ‘Blind

Harry’, which deals with the exploits of the great hero of Scottish independence,
Sir

William Wallace.

1700s Ulster – the Anglican Ascendancy

The authorities in the eighteenth century were not in general kindly disposed
towards

literate, articulate and democratically-minded people from the working classes.

Although

philosophers of the Enlightenment throughout Europe had begun to express the

theories of individual rights and freedom of religion that we take for granted
today, most

governments were authoritarian in outlook and legal systems reflected this.

Ireland had

its own Parliament that sat in Dublin, but it was dominated by the Ascendancy:

Anglicans, who did not represent Catholics, the majority in Ireland as a whole, or

Presbyterians, who made up the majority of the population in Ulster. For much of
the

eighteenth century these groups suffered discriminatory Penal Laws, and even
when

these were relaxed, both continued to feel marginalised. Both also continued to
be

required to pay the hated tithe: a tax amounting to ten percent of income levied
by the

Anglican church. In addition, the Test Act of 1704 required anyone holding public
office,
3
or a commission in the army or militia to provide a certificate verifying that he
had

received Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of Ireland. This
struck in

particular at the Ulster Presbyterian business community’s dominance of

municipal

corporations. The combined effect of such measures encouraged many

Presbyterians

to seek the freedom from government interference that was offered in the
frontier zones

of the New World. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the American colonies

asserted their independence of the mother country in 1776, Scotch-Irish

Presbyterians were often in the vanguard of the revolutionary forces.

The Age of Revolution comes to Ulster

The American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 seemed to

demonstrate to other nations that governments could be challenged successfully

by the

People. By the 1790s one of the most popular texts circulated among readers in
the

Ulster Book Clubs was the American Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man which set out
in a

very accessible style the arguments for liberty and democracy. Also devoured
with great enthusiasm were the works of the young Scots ploughman-poet,
Robert Burns,

who wrote verses in the broad ‘Scotch’ tongue used by the Ulster-Scots
themselves. His

poetry, including pieces such as ‘Is there for honest poverty’, which stressed the
value

of the individual regardless of social status, inspired and encouraged many early

democrats and reformers among the labouring and middle classes.

Such radical thinking had already filtered down to many ordinary Presbyterians
via the

Scottish connection. As with the Ulster-Scots ministers of the early 1600s, most

4
Presbyterian ministers were trained at Glasgow University where the philosopher

Francis Hutcheson, born at Saintfield in County Down and often credited as the
‘father

of the Scottish Enlightenment’, influenced generations of Ulster students with his

teachings. These teachings included the citizens’ right of resistance to an unjust,

oppressive government. Sects such as the Covenanters which were more

conservative,

or Bible based, in theology than were Hutcheson’s disciples also had a long
history of

opposition to a hostile state, and in their case attitudes were sharpened by the
emory of

persecution.

Another text which exerted a powerful influence on Ulster Presbyterian thinking

was Lex

Rex, or The Prince and the Law which had been written by the Covenanter
minister Rev

Samuel Rutherford in 1644. Rutherford was a friend of many of the Ulster-Scots

ministers of the early 1600s, and he mounted a devastating theological and

intellectual

challenge to the claim to absolute authority exerted by the earlier Stuart

monarchs.

However, the book’s sub-title reveals the author’s revolutionary principles: the

lawfulness of resistance in the matter of the King’s unjust invasion of life and
religion.

No wonder, then, that prior to the Rebellion upper class English commentators
clearly

often felt in somewhat alien territory in Ulster: In 1787 the fourth Duke of
Rutland

making his Viceregal tour of Ireland observed that ‘the province of Ulster is filled
with

Dissenters, who are in general very factious – great levellers and republicans
[…]. The

Dissenting ministers are for the most part very seditious, and have great sway
over their
5
flocks […].’ This opinion was endorsed by John Beresford in 1798 who writes,
‘Again,

the Dissenters are another set of enemies of the British government. They are
greatly

under the influence of their clergy, and are taught from their cradles to be
republicans,

[…].’ 2

The Society of United Irishmen

In the final decade of the eighteenth century Presbyterians in their thousands

joined the

United Irishmen with the aim of achieving a more democratic and inclusive
government

for their Irish homeland. The Society of United Irishmen was as much the
brainchild of

Dr William Drennan, a Belfast Presbyterian who had been educated at the

universities

of Glasgow and Edinburgh, as it was of the better known Dublin Anglican Wolfe
Tone.

Their aims were to unite Protestants (Anglicans), Catholics and Dissenters

(Presbyterians) as Irishmen, to work for a reform of Parliament and to try to

achieve greater independence for Ireland from Britain. Tone certainly desired the
complete

separation of the two countries.

The term ‘United Irish’ should not be confused with later movements to bring
about a

United Ireland in the wake of the partition of the island in 1921. Tone’s intention
in

choosing the name for the Society of United Irishmen was to encourage Irish
people to

embrace a common cultural and national identity regardless of their different

religious

affiliations. In addition, the Society accommodated members who held a wide

spectrum

of political opinions and originated from a variety of social backgrounds:

reformers,
6
revolutionaries, self-taught labourers, middleclass manufacturers and scholars.

Following a series of meetings during the spring and summer of 1791 the Society
was

founded in October 1791 at Peggy Barclay’s Tavern, located in one of the entries
off

High Street in Belfast.

The United Irishmen in the Ards and North Down

Within a few years it had spread out across the city and into Counties Antrim and
Down

where Presbyterians were to be found in their greatest numbers. Members of

United

Irish Societies had to be protected from government and military harassment so

the

organisation spread under cover, its members bound by oaths of secrecy. In the
same

period reformers, known as radicals, were forming societies to further similar

aims

throughout the British Isles. Their plan was to establish and maintain contacts for

support and in order to share intelligence. Once again we can see the
importance of the

Scottish connection with Ulster, for the reformers in Ireland clearly hoped to
galvanise

the support of their Scottish neighbours in pursuit of the cause of Liberty.

The Scottish Connection – “Friends of the People” and the “United Scotsmen”.

Ten months after the formation of the United Irishmen, the association known as
the

Friends of the People was established in Edinburgh. Its mainly middle-class and
skilled

working-class members wished to achieve ‘equal representation of the people’

but by

‘constitutional means’. The movement spread quickly and became particularly

strong in

south Ayrshire, which almost 200 years earlier had been a hotbed of Covenanter

7
resistance to the state. Its first convention was held in Edinburgh, in December
1792

and it is here that we see evidence of the Ulster-Scotland links. One of the
delegates at

the convention was the Glasgow lawyer Thomas Muir who was a friend of
Archibald

Hamilton Rowan from Killinchy, and of William Drennan. Muir, it was later
alleged, was

a member of both the Friends of the People and of the United Irishmen. In the
course of

the Convention the delegates heard and passed fairly moderate resolutions

that called for constitutional reform. Muir, however, brought the Irish Address,
penned

by Drennan. The following quotation illustrates its passion and fervor which
inspired

some but alarmed many with the fear of French-style revolution: ‘We greatly
rejoice that

the spirit of freedom moves over the surface of Scotland….Werejoice that you do
not consider yourselves merged and melted down into another country, but that
in this great

national question you are still Scotland – the land where … Wallace fought’.

Muir was eventually forced to withdraw the Address but he visited Drennan and
Rowan

again in Ireland in 1793, returning to Scotland in July. That the links between
Scots and

Irish radicals were making the authorities nervous is evident from the fact that
he was

arrested at Portpatrick,

tried and eventually sentenced to transportation for fourteen years to Botany

Bay,

though he later escaped. While Muir was imprisoned in Edinburgh, Rowan

visitedhim.

Shortly afterwards, however, Scottish radicalism received another blow with the
public

8
execution of Robert Watt in 1794, convicted for plotting armed resistance to the
state.

The Road to Rebellion

Back in Ulster, the authorities grew increasingly anxious about the movement for

reform. United Irish ranks were infiltrated by government spies, known activists
were

imprisoned and eventually martial law was brought in as an attempt to clamp

down on

United Irish schemes.

Official fears of the United Irishmen and of other radical societies throughout the

kingdom were set out in a report made to the ‘Committee of Secrecy’ of the
House of

Commons in January 1799. The report details the activities of secret political
societies

that had a ‘treasonable’ purpose and which laboured ‘to propagate among the
lower

classes of the community, a spirit of hatred for the existing laws and government
of the

country’.3 What in particular was feared was the manner in which societies in
different

parts of the British Isles set up links and contacts to support one another.

It is clear that the Scottish connection was maintained frequently through the
sea

‘corridor’ that linked North Down and Ards with Ayrshire and Galloway. By 1796 a
new

Scottish radical society, the United Scotsmen had begun in secret to establish a

network of supporters. In many cases the seasonal workers, packmen, migrant

weavers

and others who crossed from Donaghadee to Portpatrick, proved to be under

cover

United Irish agents who were seeking to assist and advise their Scottish
brethren. There

were so many, in fact, that Customs and Excise officers at Portpatrick were
ordered to
9
scan the passengers disembarking at Portpatrick in the hope of detecting
suspicious

individuals who were to be returnedto Donaghadee on the next available boat.

Such

precautions were not very successful, however. Ayrshire in particular, but also
other

areas in the west of Scotland, were infiltrated with Irish agents. The historian
Elaine

McFarland has shown that the term ‘planting Irish potatoes’ came to be used as
code

for developing new branches of the United Scotsmen, while the aristocracy of
southern

Scotland regarded the inhabitants of the Ards area as rather dangerous

neighbours to

the Scots. 4

Rev William Steele Dickson

(Ballyhalbert & Portaferry) and Scotland Rev W. S. Dickson, believed to have

been the United Irish Adjutant General in County

Down, certainly visited Scotland in the spring of 1798. He visited a relative in

Scotland

in March 1798, but on his return his luggage was seized and searched at
Portaferry

‘…every thing in which dangerous concealments seemed likely to be contained,

was

tossed, shaken, and turned outside in, to no purpose…’ He was suspected by the

authorities of visiting Scotland to “…form and promote united societies there,

and a

correspondence, between them and those of this country…”. The Presbyterian

character of the United Irishmen of Antrim and Down was shared with their

sympathisers in Scotland. In an effort to hamper the cross-water connections,

the

authorities in Scotland spread propaganda which exaggerated the influence of

Catholics

in the movement.
10
Dickson was arrested on 5 June 1798 and was imprisoned – first on a prison ship
in

Belfast Lough, and was later transferred to Fort George in the north of Scotland.
Whilst

imprisoned in Scotland, Dickson was asked by another prisoner if the

insurrection in

Ireland was a “popish rebellion” – to which he replied “such an assertion was one
of the

many falsehoods by which the people of Britain were deceived and misled…” .
Dickson

then wrote down the names and church denominations of 20 leaders of the
United

Irishmen – 10 Anglicans, six Presbyterians and four Catholics. Dickson handed it

to his

questioner and whispered “…please sir, to look at that, and then tell me what
becomes

of your popish rebellion?” Dickson later wrote that he “had a general

acquaintance in

Scotland, spent a considerable time there… I might have been promoting a

connexion

between the disaffected here, and people of the same description, in that
country”. 5

The Rebellion Fails

Given all this activity, it came as a bitter disappointment to the United Irishmen
when the

United Scotsmen, for reasons not entirely clear, failed to rise en masse in
support of the

1798 Rebellion during May and June of that year. Some Scots participated in a
quite

different way, however, as members of Scottish regiments employed to suppress

the

United Irish insurgents: at the Battle of Ballynahinch, for example, where the
Down

United Irishmen were decisively defeated on June 12/13.

11
Portpatrick continued to be a significant port during the Rising, not as an exit
point for

United Scotsmen en route to Ulster, but as a place of refuge for County Down

inhabitants of all classes who wanted to escape the violence.

Undoubtedly the Rising and its suppression resulted in an appalling loss of life
that

disillusioned many. Presbyterians in particular were shocked when they learned

of the

sectarian nature of much of the fighting in the south. So when an attempt was
made to

re-ignite rebellion in 1803, the men of the Ards did not, on the whole, turn out.
The

eighteenth-century Ulster-Scots poet Francis Boyle of Gransha, County Down was

not a

supporter of the United Irishmen but in his poem ‘The Colonel’s Retreat’ he
chronicled the defeat of Henry Munro under whose command many men from
North Down and the

Ards fought at the Battle of Ballynahinch. Munro, a Lisburn linen draper of Scots

descent was a sincere patriot, admired for his fair-mindedness, courage and
heroic

character, but he was tried and hanged for his part in the Rebellion. Boyle
pleaded with

his readers to learn the lesson of such events:

My friends, be admonished no more to rebel, Its dreadful effects there’s no poet

can tell,

It desolates countries, proves nations’ o’erthrow, Brings men to the scaffold like
General

Munro.

The Act of Union

With the twin purpose of seeking to pacify Ireland and to establish firm control
over it,

the British government brought about the Union of Britain and Ireland in an Act
which

12
took effect on 1 January 1801. It was intended that the Union should deliver
Catholic

emancipation, though this promise was not adhered to. In Ulster the enthusiastic

ssupport for the French Revolution that had been expressed in the parades of
1791 had

now largely been replaced by distrust and fear of the threatening, colonialist
ambitions

of Napoleonic France. In addition, the province was still traumatised by the

violence of

the Rising and its brutal aftermath.

Contributions to the poetry column of the Belfast Newsletter in the Union period
give an

indication of how opinions were developing. In the autumn of 1800, several

readers who

were enthusiastic about the wellnigh completed Union project contributed verse

designed to express their satisfaction. ‘A Song on the Union’, January 16, 1801 is

exultant in tone:

Arise mighty Kingdom, Enjoy thy proud fate, and hail the blest area that renders
thee

great! May each year increase Thy Prosperity’s store And Union befriend thee till
time

be no more.

On Jan 6, however, when the Union was only days old in law, the Newsletter
turned to

Robert Burns for a mot juste, or at least to a poem for which Burns had
expressed

admiration. Readers were offered the anonymous, ballad-like ‘Keen blaws the
wind o’er

Donnocht Head’, and informed that it appeared ‘in Dr Currie’s edition of Burns’s
works

printed at Liverpool’.

Here a homeless, lonely bard, wishing to escape appalling winter weather in a

desolate,

13
highland landscape, begs for shelter at the home of a kindly couple. The setting,
the

minstrel’s bereft situation and the state of the country depicted must strongly
have

suggested to Ulster readers in January 1801 the condition of Scotland following

the

Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, but also, inevitably, the condition of their own land,
post-

1798. The piece concludes: Nae hame have I, the minstrel said Sad party strife
o’erturned my ha’; And weeping at

the eve of life, I wander through a wreath of snaw. The message seems clear –

continuing party strife will serve only to perpetuate ruin and desolation.

Other factors too played their part in the change in the Ulster-Scots’ mindset that

eventually caused most to become Unionists. Not all Presbyterians had

supported the

aims or the methods of the United Irishmen. Many sincere adherents of the faith

considered rebellion as foolish at best and at worst sinful. In addition, the

suppression of

the Rising decimated the radical leadership, with many of the most gifted and
vociferous

commanders executed or exiled. Those left behind, and their children, lived to
witness

and to share in the prosperity brought to Ulster by the developing linen and ship-
building

industries, and so had progressively less desire to see the order of the state
disturbed.

Furthermore, the vigorous, popularist movement for Catholic Emancipation led

by

Daniel O’Connell may have led Presbyterians, a majority in the North, but a
minority

within Ireland, to fear that they might once again become marginalised in their
own

country. For a time at least during the nineteenth century many Ulster-Scots
and, it

14
should be said, their Scottish neighbours, came to believe that strong central

government, industrialisation and the growth of Empire would offer opportunity,

stabilitity

and security. Undoubtedly these considerations contributed massively to their

increasingly whole-hearted identification with the United Kingdom.

15